Scars
by cellotlix
Summary: "Maybe it's a weakness bred into Shepard's very being; that no matter who wears her skin and blood and bones, she will love Kaidan Alenko. It earns her a beating when the Illusive Man catches her reading nearly a decade's worth of his reports, but she can't help herself. There is an odd fire in her gut as she studies Kaidan Alenko's words." Citadel DLC.


**AN: This fic is a gift to the lovely and wonderful Rosenkovmaterials (who you should all follow on tumblr when you get the chance, because her meta is second to none). Her prompt was: ****_"you know i'm kinda in the mood for some hurt/comfort. maybe something based off citadel? how shepard really feels about there being a clone of her without any of her scars or imperfections or bad memories. with kaidan reassuring her he wouldn't have her any other way of course." _**** Thanks for reading, guys, and I hope you enjoy! **

_She has no memories. She woke fully formed, fully adult, yet more a child than any child ever to be born, for she lacks the accumulation of years that should have formed her. She is a tree without roots, a temple without foundation; empty, shifting on shiftless ground. She looks right, but is wrong. _

_She prods the unfamiliar features that stare at her in the mirror, and it takes her a few days to grow accustomed to the way they move to her every half-formed thought. _

_Here is her body, this foreign carriage: strong hands with slim fingers that culminate to an awkward, disjointed degree and do not ripple with tremors; wide, deep-set eyes that are not hooded by experience; a placid, untouched brow; and skin – miles of untouched, unmarked skin, smooth as silk. There are no marks on this canvas, no chinks where there should be. She has the physique but not the curse of memory. _

_And there are no scars._

* * *

Shepard has become so accustomed to the weight of a gun in her hands that she knows she could engage an enemy while asleep, even piercing the high target of his forehead purely by instinct, honed by thousands upon thousands of similar situations. There is little that surprises her anymore; a futile war against reaping machines will do that to a person. Yet she is surprised now, for when face to face with this new enemy, she stares into a face she knows well.

She is buzzing with adrenaline and temper, and because the combination has made her slightly loopy, she wonders for a half-second if she is facing a mirror and not the hazy force field that has trapped her with Kaidan and James. But the moment passes – she is staring into her own face, planted onto a stranger's. She is watching a copy move her limbs, arrange her features, like a thief. Beside her, Kaidan sucks in a hard breath.

First she thinks the copy is flawless, and before it's even confirmed she knows this to be the work of the Illusive Man. But the clone advances and slowly the illusion falls away. The gait is wrong – this duplicate is light on her feet, swaggering with youthful, confident grace, the way Shepard walked when she was young, before she knew the scent of blood and the burn of fear, of exhaustion, of defeat. When she speaks, her voice is clearer; not at all the hoarse voice Shepard uses these days. She is faster, stronger, more powerful.

And she is as unblemished as a newborn.

* * *

_She knows these faces. Former Shepard, the broken down wreck she's replacing. James Vega, the failure on Fehl Prime. And – him. This face, she knows; through some kind of darkness and memory and rote. This face she feels on a primal level, moving through her blood and bones, thrilling with her suddenly unsteady heartbeat. _

_She wasn't ready for this, but she is Shepard. She is better, she is real. She swallows her reaction and turns away from the beautiful, confounding man, and faces her adversary. _

_She's been conditioned to think of herself as the superior replacement to a defective model. "The old Shepard failed me," said the Illusive Man as he inspected his handiwork that first day, the first day she opened her eyes. "You will not." _

_"I will not," she echoes. She latches onto this, she believes it. She doesn't know anything else._

* * *

"You've been erased," says the imposter, pacing grandly with Brooks at her back. "Your ship, your life is now mine. When the Council pulls up Shepard's prints and records, they won't find yours, they'll find mine. And they'll believe me."

Shepard swallows her anger, though the heat of it might burn away her tongue. "You think I'm just going to let you waltz in and take my life? You obviously don't know much about me."

"I know everything about you," the clone snaps, and in that moment they might have been twins, for their anger is identical. "I know more about you than you ever will."

* * *

_The old Shepard seethes from behind the force field, pacing like a mad cat. It's only after a moment that she realizes she's unconsciously mirroring her predecessor. _

_She seethes. Look at this broken down old woman, this pitiful creature. Secure in the devotion of her followers, the love of her lover. Her predecessor. Slow on her feet, which might as well be lumps of ground beef for how badly they've been worn over the years. Scars – some old, some recent – cut across the bridge of her nose, through her eyebrow. There are fading freckles on her cheekbones, differently arranged. Her hair is lank and deep circles loom under her eyes, which appear bruised in the low light. _

_She only has to shut down the force field and crush this woman's pathetic bone basket under her heel. Then she will be the real Shepard, the _only _Shepard. There won't be a bitter outdated model wreaking havoc in her wake. There would be no other claim to this life; none aside from hers. _

_And it will be easy. Look how frail she is, look how worn! There's a tremor that runs up her hands; a sign of jagged ghosts that haunt her still. First, she had feared that her lack of memory would fail her in some way, but look how it torments her predecessor! She can't even go a day without being submerged by her memories and failures. Look how well context serves her!_

_She reaches out to flick off the force field when the old Shepard catches her eye. She's furious, she's hungry. "Go on," that pitiful old woman coaxes. "Why don't you open this field and finish the job?"_

_And in that moment, a jagged spike of fear freezes her heart. There is raw power in the old Shepard's voice, like rumble of thunder that precedes the storm. She only saw the wear on this broken down wreck of a woman; she failed to consider that despite it, she continued on. _

_She's afraid like she's never been in her life, but she pastes a smile on her face. "Why bother? I'll let starvation do that for me."_

* * *

"Kaidan Alenko, right?" says the clone. Her eyes are wicked, but something darker looms, something wanting. "Heard all about you, about Virmire. Personally, I would have saved the other one." The taunt sounds wrong coming from her mouth.

Shepard and Kaidan recoil as Ash's memory streaks through their minds like a whip crack, but Kaidan recovers first. "What do you know about Virmire that you didn't learn from a report? You'll never know what you might have done, because you weren't there. You're a fake, and nothing will change that."

The clone's easy smugness fades completely. She looks as if Kaidan drove a blade through her heart.

* * *

_"I am Shepard," she snaps, and the lie makes her defensive, angry. She turns away, to hide the furious tears crowding her eyes. "I'm better in every way than you ever will be." _

_"There's an easy way to find out for sure," says the old Shepard. Her finger twitches on the trigger of her pistol. _

_But she doesn't engage. She leaves them in the archive and hopes they'll suffocate before they starve. _

_She hates herself when a part of her screams to let her lover free. _

* * *

Shepard paces as she considers their prison, but beside her Kaidan is so still he doesn't seem to breathe. She's afraid something is wrong before his gaze flickers to her own, and though she tries, she can't read what lurks in those whiskey-brown eyes she loves so well. She's stressed, and in her state of mind, his remoteness seems to be a personal condemnation.

Maybe he looks at the wear and tear and wishes she looked more like her clone; all smooth edges, silky skin, no scars in hidden corners, no tremors and night terrors and fear so large it lodges itself like a stone in the back of her throat.

She's being stupid. Kaidan wouldn't look twice at that imposter, not after what she did, not after what she said. Ash is a sore spot between then – a much loved sister, long gone – and they don't tolerate attacks done in her name.

With a breath, she pushes these thoughts away. She's made a career out of impossibilities. And as far as those go, this doesn't even break the top ten.

"Glyph," she says into her comm. "Get us out of here."

* * *

_She was Shepard now, so she knew. _

_She's been drilled on her life – her family, her past. Her service record. Elysium, Saren and the geth, a thousand other victories that encouraged people to worship Shepard like some kind of god made flesh, charging into impossible places with her guns out, her eyes narrowed. She'd practiced that expression in the mirror, and the Illusive Man had nodded, fierce approval bright in his eyes._

_"Promising," he said, and she clung to his words like they were scraps dropped from the master's table, and she hadn't eaten in weeks. She consumed them ravenously, and held them close to her heart. _

_The Illusive Man is a strange fixture in her life; part father, part lover, part owner. He oversees her education, and sometimes his fingers trail over her unmarked flesh as if testing the texture, measuring it as real or not. And when his lips curl upward, she feels a hot burst of victory sure upward, thick in her throat._

_He was the first person she ever saw, his strange luminescent eyes boring into hers, scrutinizing before they softened. They are the filter through which she sees the world, the perspective she trusts most, for she doesn't have one of her own. She adores him and longs for him. And when he speaks, she listens with every fiber of her being. _

_"Tell me why the former Shepard was weak," says the Illusive Man, pacing around her._

_"She is broken," she is quick to reply. "Willful. Disobedient. Arrogant. Foolish."_

_These are all right answers, but the Illusive Man is not satisfied. "Keep going." _

_She struggles for more right answers. "She is afraid." _

_"Of what?"_

_She rifles through the memories that are not hers, the history that she had not lived. It is a struggle not to read these things as if they happened long ago to another, but she tries. They're a part of her now, if she is to be real. If she is to belong to her name. "I don't know," she says finally, and she is so utterly furious at herself for failing that she has to keep herself from biting a hole in her lip, dripping blood down her collar. The Illusive Man would see that as a waste._

_She expects to be struck, but this time the Illusive Man frames her chin between his thumb and forefinger. "She is afraid losing those she loves." _

_"Who?" she can't keep from asking. She's desperate to do better at being Shepard._

_The Illusive Man does not show her pictures of this man, but she learns about him. Major Kaidan Alenko, thirty-five years old, skilled biotic and serviceman. He and Shepard met three years ago, on the Normandy SR-1. They fought Saren and the geth at each other's side. They lost a friend on Virmire, and the loss of her brought them even closer together. Shepard died, and he grieved; full of want and measure and hurt. He threw himself into work. _

_And she knows she is supposed to hate this man, but she reads about his life – Jump Zero, Vancouver, his parents, his character (reserved, subtly funny, steady, solid ground to stand on), and she knows that it won't matter. _

_Maybe it's a weakness bred into Shepard's very being. That no matter who wears her skin and blood and bones, she will love Kaidan Alenko. Though it's stupid, though it earns her a beating when the Illusive Man catches her reading nearly a decade's worth of his reports. "Cerberus didn't secure those to fuel your fascination," he snaps, eyes popping furiously, but she can't help herself now. _

_There is an odd fire in her gut as she studies Kaidan Alenko's words. _

* * *

The clone tries to take over the Normandy, but Shepard knows that ship like the back of her hand. She thinks sometimes that she and that beautifully scarred hunk of metal are two sides of the same sword. She can almost feel those hands that don't belong, pulling it apart piece by piece, trying to make space for itself where it doesn't belong. There's no room for an imposter between conjoined twins. There's no room for a fake on her ship.

* * *

_She knows the layout of the Normandy, but it's strange regardless. She locks down the inessentials and sets the mercs to work preparing for launch. But while they force an unwilling hunk of metal into action, she wanders up to the quarters that are now hers. _

_Dozens of old fashioned books litter the shelves, some of them shedding pages like fur. There is a hamster sleeping in a cage lined with cedar-y woodchips; it hides when she taps her finger on the glass, and no amount of coaxing will bring it out again. And ships – more model ships that she could ever name or count. Not the cheap kind either, but the kind that come in pieces and take hours to painstakingly assemble. She wonders how a woman with tremors manages such a delicate operation. _

_Clothes in the closet. Rumpled sheets. They smell like two people instead of one. _

* * *

She crawls through the ducts, on her hands and knees. Voices drift down through the vents. She thinks for a moment that she can hear the Illusive Man issuing orders, but the moment passes and she is left in the relative silence.

She can feel Kaidan behind her, and she wonders what is going through his mind at this instant. Is he watching her with mirrored anger, or is he fascinated by Shepard as she should be?

These insidious thoughts, growing like weeds. She crawls faster, as if hoping to outrun them.

* * *

_"Shepard's aboard – the real one!"_

_"How in the hell—?"_

_"She's in the vents!"_

_"Shit."_

_She pretends this doesn't pierce her through the heart. She's the real one, now. They're supposed to believe that too. They were hired to believe that now. _

_But she looks in their faces and sees that they don't fear her like they fear Shepard – the real one. The Real One is crawling through the belly of the ship as they speak. The Real One is chewing the glass of her rage, ready to spit bullets until she's had her say. The Real One is a woman to be feared, a woman to respect. _

_A woman whose life she covets so desperately, she no longer knows how to articulate this shiftless want. It has grown beyond the confines of her body, this body she stole, this body that does not truly belong to her. This pathetic echo of the Real One._

_So what is she, then? The Fake One? _

_NO. _

_SHE is the Real One. The bitch crawling through the vents is the imposter. She had her time and screwed it up. She threw the Illusive Man's gifts back in his face and called him a fool. She squandered everything bright and wonderful she'd been freely given. Her predecessor didn't fight for her life, like she had._

_How wonderful it should be, to live and know that you were you and your life belonged fully to you, without having to fight for possession like a pair of scrapping dogs. _

_She checks her armor and storms through the ship to the cargo bay. She will stamp out this failure once and for all. She will claim what should have belonged to her from birth; the life, the memories, the love that crowds her eyes and makes her throat tight with tears._

_She is the Real One._

* * *

It's a tough fight. The clone is fast and furious, driven by some dark need that Shepard is afraid she understands. Her eyes – the exact same blue, the exact same shape, even boasting similar dark circles underneath – are hardened with desperate rage. When weapons are spent, they fly at each other with fists out, hands curled into bludgeons. They pummel each other, and Shepard hears the same catch in the clone's breath that she's had nearly all her life.

Shepard knows what drives her. Fury at this abomination. Fury at Brooks (should have known, god damn it, should have seen!) Fury at this bullshit, happening now when the Reapers are driving them back, wiping them out, when millions die every day. Fury at the Illusive Man, who wasn't content to manipulate her life alone; who had to create some cruel, mocking facsimile, who laughs from the sidelines as his toys duke it out.

_Look how perfect she is, _he might as well have said. _Not a mark on her. Strong where you're weak. Beautiful where you're haggard. Look how perfect you could have been._

She's not perfect.

She's angry.

* * *

_Real shoots out a left hook. Fake blocks with her forearm. Real swings again, a feral haymaker. Fake blocks, stumbles on hamburger feet. Look how weak she is, look how frail. You could blow her over with a breath. You could knock her out with a kiss. _

_She's learned to hate her face, merely by the virtue that she shares it with this pile of slop, this weakling. Look how tired she is, look how sad. _

_She's not paying attention when Fake smashes her in the head with enough force to knock it clean off her shoulders. She was watching Kaidan, watching them both. She was watching his beautiful face, hating the things he said. She was swallowing the hole that he'd left in her chest, pushing it away, hating him as much as she loved. _

_She drops like a sack of bolts._

* * *

Whoever is flying the Normandy lacks Joker's skill. The ship bucks through the sky like a drunken rhinoceros, shuddering every few moments as the helmsman attempts some half-thought maneuver he probably saw in some vids. Shepard and the clone topple backward, sliding on the ramp until they are clinging to the lip, the only thing between them and a solid drop of a few thousand feet being the strength of their fingers.

She's not so strong anymore. Though she's tired enough to let go and drop through the air like a stone, she knows she has something to live for, and it's something she never had to question, never had to find. She's bent, hell-sent. She'll defeat the Reapers or die trying. So she kicks the whistling air and tries to hoist herself over the lip of the ramp, her jaw bowstring tight from exertion.

"Shepard!" comes a voice, and before she can blink Kaidan is there- right there, right when she needed him. He throws himself forward and slides down the ramp, James anchoring him by the ankle, and grips her tightly by the forearm, hauling her over the ramp. Decked out in arms and armor, she's no lightweight, but he yanks her up like she's no heavier than a pillow. His eyes are ringed by white, they're open so wide.

And she turns back, watching her clone struggle. Watching comprehension dawn. Watching hurt bigger than either of them settle on those perfect, unblemished features.

And Shepard reaches.

* * *

_Shepard shouts over the howling wind, her hand outstretched. "Come on!" she's screaming, those old hands tremoring like crazy, but still steady enough to beat the tar out of her, steady enough to piece together model ships. Steady enough to hold tight to Kaidan Alenko and never let go._

* * *

"Come on, damn it!" Shepard screams at the clone. "Take my hand!"

The clone looks at her, and something breaks in her eyes – shatters like glass. "Why?" she says. Shepard can barely hear her over the wind.

* * *

_"Why would you save me?" she asks Shepard. "I wouldn't have saved you."_

_"Maybe you would have." _

_She believes that. She really believes that. Beaten and broken, but she can still look at an enemy and give them a chance, hold out her hand and expect that good turn returned. Maybe she looks at her face reflected on a stranger's and feels some sort of kinship. Maybe she thinks they could be family._

_They're not. Shepard is the Real. The clone is the fake. Pieced together from discarded parts, alive long enough to know that this life she wanted wasn't hers to have, but hers to take. She looks at the beautiful man beside Shepard and knows this love in her heart is just another vestigial organ to be cut out and cast aside, and he'd know it as fake if he looked too close._

_But in that first moment, that solitary breath when he looked at her and didn't know her from the real… _

_Maybe she was the Real._

_Her fingers relax, and she flies away._

* * *

Shepard stands in front of her bathroom mirror and prods her face, the familiar features under her stiff fingers. Her cheekbones are mottled with bruises that rose to the surface only hours after she'd fought her clone. When she presses her thumb to them, they fade whiter than bone.

These scars she's collected; a gash threading through her eyebrow, a slice over the bridge of her nose, mottled scars on her back from burnt armor fusing to flesh, courtesy of the Collectors. When she looks at herself, she sees her clone looking back, ironed silky smooth, stronger than she is.

She fought Shepard the ideal today, and it's shaken her.

It hadn't taken long to put things to right in her cabin. One ship had been displaced – the model of the Normandy SR-1 – and it'd been a simple matter to put it back where it belonged. Her hamster took a little more coaxing, but in the end even he couldn't resist a tasty snack. She'd jumped a little when his tiny teeth grazed her palm.

She leans closer to the mirror until her face folds in on itself, revealing a distorted amalgam of features, one single eye boring into hers. Even this close, she can't escape the wear and tear.

And she wonders, as she studies herself. For all their protests to the contrary, if the clone had presented herself less like a tantruming child and more like a leader, would they have chosen her? She might not have blamed them, in those circumstances. If you're faced with a choice between a broken down old ship and a brand-new one, shining with a coat of fresh paint, the engines bristling with life, you couldn't be blamed for wanting the newer one. It'd be faster, stronger. Better endurance.

She thinks about Kaidan, and the way his brows shot up when he first caught a glimpse of the clone in all her glory. Now that the danger is over and the score is settled, there is nothing to distract her from these worries, so she ruminates. She fears what makes her Shepard makes her ugly.

It's cheap, sure. It's shallow. These thoughts have no place in a Commander's mind, not with the galaxy on the line. (As if even her thoughts and worries are property of the people she fights to save).

She's so absorbed that she doesn't notice Kaidan behind her until he slides his hand up her arm, cupping her shoulder. He presses a kiss on her shoulder blade, on the valley of her spine, and she shivers under his lips.

"You okay?" he murmurs, trailing up to her neck and lifting her hair away to press another kiss to the knob there.

"Yeah," she says, but she hunches forward, leans away. "Just can't sleep."

"This for any particular reason, or your regular bouquet of worries?"

"Ah – regular. Yeah, definitely."

"You're lying."

She turns around, but she doesn't pull away when he wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her close. "If you knew the answer, why even ask me?"

"I thought I'd give you a chance to come clean."

"How magnanimous."

"Aren't I?"

She doesn't want to smile, but her lips betray her. "Yeah, you are."

He kisses the corner of her mouth, and she unconsciously leans into his touch; how wonderful it is already, to have this kind of assurance. "What's bothering you?"

"It's silly."

"It probably isn't and you're giving yourself a hard time, as usual."

"How did you get to be such an expert on me?"

"Through lots of careful study," he says, kissing her again.

She pulls away and organizes her turbulent thoughts into orderly lines, easily parsed, easily shared. But the sharp kernel of her fear eludes logical definition, which irritates her into confession. "I thought . . . I don't know. Just bothered me to see the clone. All perfect. Faster, stronger. No . . . no scars."

He's quiet for a moment. "Yeah, it was quite a sight."

She can hardly bring herself to speak the words, so she decides to twist them into mockery. "Bet it was nice to see me looking like that. All ironed out, no chinks. I don't think my skin's looked that nice since I was a teenager. And my hair? Heh."

But he sees through the joke, straight to the heart of the matter. "You know, I thought it was interesting, looking at the two of you."

"Interesting?" She cranes closer, taken off guard.

"Aside from the fact that she looked like the human equivalent of a new car, you looked so alike in that first moment – when I couldn't see her clearly. And then the longer I looked, the more . . . well, wrong she looked. The freckles were wrong, no scars. And her eyes – those were different too. I can't really explain it right.

"I mean, for all intents and purposes, you were pretty much identical. But she wasn't really you. She wasn't really Shepard. And I just think how cruel it was for the Illusive Man to tell her that she could be, that she could swoop in and steal your life, and no one would be any the wiser."

"You'd have known?" Shepard whispers.

"I'd have known," he says simply. "You're more than just a mix of genes, grown just so. You're everything you've done, everywhere you've been. I'd have known."

"You _did _know," she says, smiling so wide she feels like her face will crack right in half, right down the seam of her grin.

"I did," he echoes before he presses his lips to hers, lightly as a sigh. "I'll always know you for you."

* * *

_In the guts of the Citadel lies a pile of broken parts that might have made the woman Shepard in a different life. Here, the hands they might have grafted on the real; there, the legs. They grew a liver in her that the real Shepard uses now. _

_This broken pile of parts turns its eyes toward the sky and waits to be put together again. _


End file.
